ferm VS Shorewall

I remember hating shorewall and similar ones because, well, I know iptables, and I know exactly what I want so using anything that tries to abstract it into it's own approach is torture as I need to take the rules I want and translate it to whatever mediocre paradigm shorewall (or ufw, or near-any other firewall manager in the wild) decided to put on top of iptables. I ended up using ferm... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

I'm a big fan of ferm. Many major distros have it readily available as a package, and it makes for beautifully readable firewall definitions. Source: about 1 year ago

The last time I needed to do complex iptables stuff, I found FERM really helpful. The structured config language greatly reduces the amount of boilerplate code you have to type, while still having a pretty direct mapping to the emitted iptables rules. A bit like compiling sass to css. Source: about 2 years ago

Also just about last thing I want is to deploy another configuration management system alongside the system that manages everything else on machine. Currently we just use Puppet to deploy ferm rules (which is best described as "iptables+", naming convention and such are still iptables-like but a lot of macros/syntax sugar around it). Source: almost 3 years ago

All mentioned items have side-channel borked firewall and route rules in the past. Some bugs intermittently silently block local daemon instances from (re)loading like magic (some bugs only happen when the system is brought up). If your daily tasks include something less borked, than consider yourself very lucky you live without systemd. If I recall, ufw was intended for simple workstation rule sets. Personally,... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

I've been using Shorewall for the last decade or so on everything from custom OpenWRT firewall/gateway solutions to servers running Debian or Ubuntu. It's great software that makes managing iptables/netfilter a breeze. Alas after many years, Mr. Eastep has retired and it doesn't appear the project is maintained by a new person or team. Source: about 1 year ago

Shorewall (https://shorewall.org/) can do the job easily. Source: over 1 year ago

Despite administrating Linux machines since 1994, I have never really looked closely at iptables because I was using shorewall and the briefly firehol. Source: over 1 year ago

You should just use https://shorewall.org/. Source: almost 3 years ago